4 Week Essential Skills Course

Get ready to bring your cookery skills to a whole new level.

Whether you are a complete novice or an accomplished amateur cook, our 4 Week Essential Skills Course is designed to help you construct a well-rounded culinary foundation that will give you the tools and confidence to flourish in the kitchen.

Dublin Cookery School’s outstanding 4 Week Essential Skills Course is designed with the busy, food-obsessed individual in mind.

Is it for you?

This course was made for explorers, storytellers, collaborators, inquisitive minds and anyone at all interested in the creative process who, of course, likes to eat.

Find out if it's for you

When we initially created the 4 Week Essential Skills Course, we wanted to bridge the gap between home cooking and the professional kitchen. The dream was to develop a well-rounded culinary program that anyone with a true penchant for cooking could very realistically set aside time for in order to seriously develop a new skill set.

Held within our state-of-the-art kitchen facilities and supported by a team of enthusiastic tutors, the programme is built around a framework of core technical and creative objectives that span all key areas of the kitchen repertoire from soups and starters to breads and pastry work. Each day, you will be working with an incredible range of ingredients, cooking with like-minded individuals, and supported every step of the way by our dedicated team of tutors.

With workshops in bread, wine appreciation, and cheese making, our students leave this programme with a healthy culinary foundation and fluency in the kitchen that will allow them to continue building their personal goals with confidence.

Upcoming dates

09 Sep
06 Jan

Course price:
€3,490

Talk to us

Interested in taking this course but would like to talk to us first? No problem, get in touch and let's have a chat.

Make an enquiry

Reserve a place

Booking on to our course? That's great! You can pay a deposit of €850.00 to reserve your spot today.

Pay your deposit

Pay your deposit

Total: €0.00

snapshot into our essential skills course

Let's get started!

  • Schedule a chat to help answer all your queries
  • Fill in the online enquiry form above to get things started! We can set up a phone or video call to go through all your queries, check course dates and availability
  • Reserve your place
  • The 4 Week Essential Skills Course requires a deposit of €850 to reserve your place. For complete details, please review the section Booking and Cancellation Policy for Certificate Courses within our full Terms & Conditions.

    The remaining balance is due 8 weeks prior to the course start date. Payments may be made via bank transfer or over the phone via credit card. 

    Two weeks prior to course commencement, final reminders and notices are sent out including the Official Student Handbook. All forms within the Admission Forms Package must also be returned at this stage.
  • Start cooking!
  • Welcome to Dublin Cookery School.

A Peak into our essential skills Course

4 Week essential skills course
Syllabus overview

We always strive to provide our students with as well-rounded an experience as possible within the 4 week period of this course. While we design our curriculums like road maps in order to securely establish our essential building blocks as we go along, the uniqueness of our students inevitably inspires new ideas and different pathways to our destination. As a result, each course is a one-of-a-kind experience that takes on a life of its own with an exact format and composition that may vary from the content listed here.

Daily Topics & Areas of Focus

Menus and techniques that embrace a global perspective and seasonality including Italian, Spanish, Indian, Middle Eastern, Moroccan, and Thai cuisines

Application of classical French techniques across all culinary building blocks

Knife skills training including traditional knife cuts and learning how to wisely choose, use, and care for kitchen tools and equipment

Introduction to cooking terminology used in professional kitchens

Kitchen organization with a focus on honing strong multi-tasking, timing, teamwork, and mise en place skills (kitchen speak for ensuring that everything is in its place)

Practical application of health and safety training including food management systems

FUNDAMENTAL Kitchen techniques

Stocks, soups, hot & cold savoury sauces including

  • Vegetable, fish, and meat bases
  • Pan sauces, fresh sauces, and salsas

Vegetables, grains & pasta

  • Within a healthy eating context
  • Within the context of starters, mains, and side dishes

Meat including

  • Beef, pork, lamb, and game
  • Poultry (including jointing and carving)

Seafood including

  • Principles of choosing, storing, and handling
  • Round and flat fish (including skinning, boning, and filleting)
  • Crustaceans and shellfish

Herbs & spices including

  • Traditional uses within various culinary cultures

Contrasting methods of cooking including

  • Dry heat such as baking, roasting, grilling, sautéing, pan-frying, and deep-frying
  • Moist heat such as simmering, boiling, steaming, and poaching
  • Combination methods such as braising

Baking & pastry including

  • Sweet and savoury pastry doughs
  • Biscuits, tray bakes, and tarts
  • Custards, mousses, and meringues
  • Hot and cold sweet sauces
  • Frozen desserts

Breads including

  • Quick breads such as soda breads, scones, and muffins
  • Yeasted breads such as traditional white, flavoured doughs, overnight starters, and enriched doughs

Interested in joining us on the course?

Give us a call or send us a message and let's start a discussion.

Contact us

A typical day

Monday – Friday
9.30 AM – 4.30 PM

This is a fully immersive course driven by a hands-on approach that gets our students in the kitchen cooking a full menu from the very start. Our programming consists of unique technical focal points as we design regular days around a framework that promotes a healthy development of organizational habits. We find that this daily structure is essential to students building confidence and fluency in a professional kitchen.

Basic course structure

09:30 AM Student briefing
09:45 AM Demo session
10:45 AM Tea & coffee break
11:00 AM Hands-on session
12:25 PM Demo session
12:45 PM Hands-on session
01:15 PM Lunch
01:45 PM Demo session
02:00 - 04:30 PM Hands-on session & clean down
  • We start every day at 9.30 AM sharp.
  • Students may arrive as early as 9:00 AM to compare their ‘Order of Work’ notes and organize their team approach for the day. Note that students will work with a different partner as well as change stations on a daily basis according to the rotation organized for the week.
  • The Hands-On component spans an entire menu.
  • Every day the menu is unique and it often consists of up to 6-8 individual dishes all of which are organized around a specific theme or technical focal point with clear objectives. This daily menu also comprises the students’ daily lunch. While the Hands-On kitchen session is bustling with various cooking projects, there is just as much attention placed on teamwork, timing, and yes of course, kitchen organization and maintenance. A healthy understanding of each of these areas combine to form the beautiful hum of a truly well-run kitchen and this enhances all practical and theoretical tasks, contributing to the overall quality of education and cooking that happens at the school.
  • The learning environment at DCS is especially personalized.
  • Throughout the Hands-On session, tutors work with students within smaller groups as well as individually to help tune into areas that need special support or to help facilitate development in particular interests unique to different students.
  • The Demonstration Kitchen is an interactive forum – no desks or whiteboards here!
  • In this kitchen, the students are presented with the following day’s menu and this takes place after lunch from 2:00 PM – 4:30 PM. While preparing and cooking this menu, the Senior Tutor leading the session introduces the techniques, methodology, and theory related to the dishes involved. This segment is all about presenting and sharing in the creative and technical culinary processes of the menu in question and we do so in a way that demands the involvement of all of your senses; everyone must taste everything! This is also the time for students to take notes, ask questions and get further invested in their education. Our students are as much the writer of their educational journey here as our tutors.